I've spent the last three years at work developing a reputation at
work for knowing my shit. I was part of a fledgling software team
inside the vast machine of my employer's networking organization, and
as part of that process I ended up either learning or building vast
swathes of the infrastructure that enables us to grow the way we
continue to do.

Needless to say, it's kind of gratifying to be the guy that my
colleagues come to when they have questions, be they technical,
architectural, or informational. Giving that up -- as I'm about to do
-- will be one of the hardest things I do at work.

I've initiated a move.

I'm not changing companies, but I am changing teams. I'm moving from
a team where I've built a reputation, built a pool of knowledge, to a
team where the domain is unfamiliar to me, the scope of impact is
different, and my teammates are uniformly senior to me in experience
and knowledge. Instead of being the one asked questions, I'll be
asking dumb newbie questions of my new colleagues. This thought is
profoundly unnerving.

Now I get to re-experience the joys of impostor syndrome in full
force. I'll be spending months spinning up on new technologies while
my immediate peers look on and wonder what the hell I'm doing there --
not that I expect them to actually think that, but I'll be thinking
that they're thinking it.

At the end of it, I'll have an entirely new skill set, a broad view of
the developer experience that we build both for ourselves and for our
customers. This is valuable. But it's going to be a hard slog to get
there.